Useful links for
English Language (Discourse, stylistics, theatre) students
Please go to Anthea Fraser Gupta’s page which contains a lot of links to web sites for English Language students:
http://www.leeds.ac.uk/english/links.html
She also has a web page on relevant readings on Singapore English (http://www.leeds.ac.uk/english/$staff/afg/singeb2.html)
Julie Coleman has a useful website on English grammar, including Old English and quizzes that will be marked on line: http://www.le.ac.uk/ee/jmc21/legp/index.html
Reinhard Hahn has an extensive list of links on the English language:
http://www.geocities.com/sassisch/rhahn/lowlands/links_english.htm
Marcus Laker also has a page which contains lots of links to sites for people interested in language, especially readers of the newsgroup alt.usage.english:
http://homepages.tcp.co.uk/~laker/aue/
That discussion group is also worth a visit, although there is a certain amount of silliness in some of the postings, as would be expected in many unmoderated news groups.
There are many on-line dictionaries, but my favourite is the Oxford English Dictionary on-line or OED online. (If this does not work, click on http://www.lib.nus.edu.sg/digital/index.html then select ‘Dictionaries and Encyclopaedia’ under Browse by type of material, then click on ‘Oxford English Dictionary’.) Unfortunately, it is only available by subscription; fortunately, NUS is a subscriber. It is updated regularly. It got Malaysians very hot under the collar recently when it described lah as belonging to Singaporean (rather than Malaysian) English!
George Landow’s site on Contemporary Post-Colonial and Post-Imperial Literature in English also contains a small collection of pages on English in Singapore and Malaysia (http://www.stg.brown.edu/projects/hypertext/landow/post/singapore/people/language/english.html)/
The Oxford Text Archive has an extensive list of online texts that can be downloaded for free (you need to supply your email address); some texts require a form to be sent by post first.
The English Company (http://www.english.co.uk/) has a web site on the global spread and the international use of English.
If you are interested in words and wordplay, try the Wordsmith site (http://www.wordsmith.org) where they have a vocabulary mailing list (A Word A Day), an anagram generator (Internet Anagram Server), among other things.
Wicked stuff for English learners (http://www.stuff.co.uk/wicked.htm) is a fun site not only for learners of the language, but if you like playing with language.
There is an electronic dictionary of British slang (http://www.peevish.u-net.com/slang/) which is also great fun.
There is a course on Language and Learning Awareness (http://www.go-ed.com/nec/index.html) that is also useful and interesting.
J C Wells has a website on Estuary English (http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/estuary/home.htm) which might be of interest to those who are keen on accents. There are also lots of links there.
Peter
Trudgill’s book Accents (1994)
(http://angli02.kgw.tu-berlin.de/html/dialects.html/dl01.html) is available
from the Institut für Linguistik (Technische
If you want to use phonetic symbols, you can download IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) fonts from SIL (formerly, Summer Institute of Linguistics) International website: SIL IPA fonts
If you have those in your computer, you should see some IPA fonts here: jUd bE/« kNIT «StnU«d U«g
Alternatively, you can try the Times New Roman Phonetic font. If you have that in your computer you should see some IPA fonts here: jUd bE?@ g@U d@UntS@ TINk
Here is a link to a site on the presence of Viking loanwords in English: (http://www.viking.no/e/england/e-viking_english.htm)
Here are some links on corpus linguistics:
·
Corpus Linguistics by Tony McEnery and Andrew Wilson
·
British
National Corpus (BNC)
- English
Language Corpora and Corpus resources at BNC
· The Survey of English usage (University College London)
· University centre for computer corpus research on language at Lancaster University
You can get hold of electronic texts from these sites:
- University of Virginia
Electronic Text Centre (UVa) a large
collection of English texts, eg Old
English Corpus (3000 texts); medieval texts (eg
Canterbury Tales); Shakespeare; and modern texts.
- Birmingham Corpus Linguistics Page
- The English Department, University of Toronto has a very good electronic collection of English poetry, including notes and comments. 336 poets (from Old English, through Chaucer and Shakespeare to the 20th century) are represented, the last time I entered their website.
There are lots of dictionary sites available:
- the Oxford English Dictionary online is available by subscription: http://www.oed.com
- www.dictionary.com is not a bad place to start
- if you’re interested in an Old English dictionary, try the freeware dictionary program, available from http://www.freelang.net/dictionary/old_english.html
- there’s
also a Middle English (print) dictionary – Mayhew and Skeat’s A Concise Dictionary of Middle English –
that’s available from the
Of course, if you prefer to buy your own books, there are many reasonable on-line bookshops, some of which offer discounts. The problem with most is that they charges for postage and packing (the American term for this, ‘shipping’, seems to be used more and more - rather intriguing to me initially as items often do not come by ship!) can represent a high percentage of the cost, particularly if you want single copies. To overcome this, you can try Singaporean bookshops, like
Other noteworthy on-line bookshops include:
· Amazon.com, and its British counterpart Amazon.co.uk for British-published books
You can go into the home pages of some of the people who have written books and articles relevant to English Language studies. There are frequently multiple links in these pages, and sometimes it is just nice to put a face to a name and find out what their other interests are.
If you have any suggestions about other links that could be included here, or if you find a broken link, please email me at PeterTan@leonis.nus.edu.sg.